Oh for crying out loud, another think-i-know-it-all loudmouth.
"When big guys join up (like Opera now) and hopefully Mozilla and Microsoft everyone would be contributing to the Webkit/Chromium code (whichever it is)."
Ever actually looked at what data chrome sends back to google about what you do?

Also please show me where the phasing out of other competition has ever been a good thing? (I'll save you some time - it hasn't)

Not great news. The less competition the more we end up with sub-standard standards implementation and propriety hacks. As much as i currently love WebKit, it's well on it's way to becoming the next IE6.

Oh for crying out loud, another think-i-know-it-all loudmouth."When big guys join up (like Opera now) and hopefully Mozilla and Microsoft everyone would be contributing to the Webkit/Chromium code (whichever it is)."Ever actually looked at what data chrome sends back to google about what you do?

Also please show me where the phasing out of other competition has ever been a good thing? (I'll save you some time - it hasn't)

You, and all the other fearmongers like you do realise that the data Chrome sends back has nothing to do with Webkit... right? And exactly the same data gets sent back to Microsoft every time you opt into their requests to send usage stats. I've been using Chrome for 3 years and strangely enough I haven't had anything bad happen to me yet. Nobody's stolen all my money, nobody's hacked my PC, the feds haven't busted my back door in...

V8 and Webkit based Chromium are simply the most advanced browser/VM today.. and instead of everyone peddling their own things they should all work on the same thing.

The situation is not any better since WHATWG split with W3C.. now they'll be pushing new features that are not really a part of the standards until W3C takes another decade to evaluate and try to make them standard if that happens, in the meantime you will see the same things happening as they have in the last 5 years with HTML5 (wild wild west). Promise of ubiquity that just works that is clearly pure BS and is still nowhere near ready for prime time.

I'm pretty sure you're switching everyone working on a standard with everyone working on an open source project. It's going to create the same mess, with each company forking it for their own purposes. Except now, it's even worse. They'll still be arguing over what should be the standard behavior. The result is:-webkit-moz-webkit-ms-webkit-appl-webkit-chrome

At least standards are enforceable. You can blame a company for breaking standards, you can't blame a company for forking an open source project.

Not great news. The less competition the more we end up with sub-standard standards implementation and propriety hacks. As much as i currently love WebKit, it's well on it's way to becoming the next IE6.

Not quite. Remember that when IE6 was around, their competition was the slowly dying Netscape Navigator, and it was the beginning of the "let's put all of our workplace applications online!" phase, mostly using Active-X, so there were huge development costs and basically no alternative.

Also, today the fight is mostly over high-level client side UI elements, a lot of which can be simulated or replaced with JavaScript. There's less demand from businesses for proprietary web technologies, and any outside company that targets one browser is shooting itself in the foot.

FANTASTIC NEWS... my dream of unified web where we don't have to write 15 CSS lines and use polyfills for a single thing and tons of libraries to make stuff look the same across browsers is coming true.

Hopefully Mozilla joins Webkit train and finally we will have Microsoft forced to switch as well..

If this happens then we can truly start phasing out Flash as building for web will be beautiful. Not to mention that the tools we will get will be as good as Flash professional as there won't be compatibility issues due to unified rendering engine and spaghetti code for 5 different browsers. This fragmentation has been destroying web for a while now. And companies can contribute with cool features like Adobe is doing with CSS3 Shaders, Blend modes and so on and it can be quickly implemented on all browsers.

THEN, we can truly say open web and browsers offer now truly unified rendering and all the cool features Flash has now and that we can't (or have hard time) doing in HTML5/JS/CSS will be implemented in Webkit.

The dream.. is just a bit closer.

Seriously, are you really that blind? I sure wouldn't want you anywhere near any websites.

I feel if Opera switches to WebKit, that's even less of a reason to use it, since it won't render any differently from Safari or Chrome, and I thought one of the appeals of Opera was its own rendering engine.

Nah, Mozilla wants an open, standards based web, and even Microsoft seems to want a standards based web now, which is seemingly more at odds with WebKit's "do whatever and get web authors to rely on it" attitude.

WebKit is the new IE6 now.

And gecko is in much better shape then presto when it comes to sites supporting it. Presto was/is a good standards compliant engine, but it had a small user base so site compatability was often still a problem. Firefox/gecko doesn't have that problem and there's no real reason for firefox to move to webkit. Firefox also has more resources for developing a browser engine than opera's small team. I do think its important that all browsers don't switch to webkit. Webkit is an excellent engine, but as you mention if EVERYONE starts using it we will run into another ie6 type situation where the web is developed for webkit and not developed with standards.

Generally it's a good thing for the web itself to have consistent standards and consistent adherence to them. On the face of it having lots of different browsers all having "their say" on how things display and then adding their own proprietary nonsense on top makes everything more complicated and is far from ideal.

The issue is not having "one rendering engine" but who has a say on what that rendering engine does. WebKit itself is open source. If the companies involved and the standards authorities developed clear, solid standards and implemented them properly it wouldn't be a bad thing. At the moment things like CSS recommendations take years.

They just better keep the features that I like about Opera in the new Opera.
Mouse Gestures, Customization, Easy searching ('w keyword' to search Wiki), the much better Speed Dial and keep down the resources that Chrome seems to use..
Though really surprised by this move..But, I hope it's for the best...Time will tell
I just hope they don't fork Chrome, I hate Chrome...I don't hate WebKit, just Chrome...